@asklemmy What do you think it would take for people to drop Twitter & Reddit and move to the Fediverse?
Everybody else doing it.
The network effect is really strong. Once you try getting people to move or try something new you really realise how strong it is.
And how do we get everyone else to do it?
Honestly, most people are followers. If you have a few high profile celebrities publicly announce they are switching over, I’m sure their fan base will do the same. Once the fans go over, then the friends of fans follow and so on.
They also have to abandon their presence on twitter as well.
Yeah, that’s probably the best way that people would move across. Knowing people are moving across to Threads, It could be a good way (once they join the Fediverse) for people to get involved with it and maybe move across to things like Mastodon and Lemmy.
Be careful what you wish for. It’s very good for us that those people stay where they are… Otherwise this place would be Twitter.
A lot of those people would need to go to there own instances that we would be able to block due to policies on most mastodon instances aligning with Trans Rights as well as other LGBT+ people being safe.
Make it active so that when they look, they see content
I’ll try to do just that then. Stay active and make this place full of content for people to enjoy.
Why on Earth would we want to do that?
The last thing in the world the fediverse needs is a bunch of idiots blundering around in it.
As an idiot currently blundering around in it, I don’t think this is something we can gatekeep, nor can we try and do it. It’s just something that will happen
The great thing about the fediverse is that people have control over which instances they are around, and there will always be some more isolated ones if that’s what you prefer
I don’t think we can gatekeep it either.
But we can, or not, encourage it. I’d rather not. I’ve never - not even once in more than 30 years online - seen a forum get notably popular without it also, and obviously as a direct result, going to shit.
The great thing about the fediverse is that people have control over which instances they are around, and there will always be some more isolated ones if that’s what you prefer.
If the masses discover the fediverse and move here, that’s not going to remain the case, guaranteed.
They’ll bitch and moan because content isn’t centralized (we’ve already seen that), and the rent-seeking fuckwads will, one way or another, rearrange things so that it is centralized, and specifically so that they can then squat on top of it and suck profit out of it, and it’ll end up just another facebook/twitter/instagram/reddit.
Count on it.
As your local blundering idiot, I disagree.
To have actual content on here. I hate having to switch between the Fediverse and normal Social Media to get updates on the niche things I enjoy.
More content. More diverse content. And more diverse users.
There really isn’t a lot of posts. A significant portion of posts are from bots. Similarly, there aren’t many comments.
It feels like most content is doomer news, politics, Linux, Star Trek, programming, or gaming related. And that’s my jam. But it gets old after a while.
And of course it would help to have more diverse users. I know we aren’t all the same, but Lemmy has a lot of software developers and left leaning folks with post secondary degrees.
Yeah, I get what you mean. It would be good to get more niche communities involved. It’s good to see like-minded people, but it’s always good for someone to have another opinion that can back up their views with facts.
People are “lazy” and only social, today. They want to log in, info dump, and not think.
Before the nadir of social media, when reddit and twitter were coming up, the people online were predominantly young millennials and new tech was exciting. That was a time where netizens were more curious and accepting of online platform learning challenges. In fact, if it was beta or even just more hands on and generally nerdy, that often made the platform more appealing. Then everything became standardized. Mega social media squashed innovative smaller fun projects. Competition got absorbed. And with the mass standardization of the internet came the younger generations who came up just expecting shit to work as they’ve always seen. Streamlined and with an inclusion of 15 minutes of fame. But, in honesty the biggest snooze is the lack of innovation that drove the old internet drives today’s general malaise.
Times are different. People are bored with internet tech and are therefore less curious. My younget gen z and y co-workers glaze over if I even so much as mention irc or playing around with your own web server. Gen y understands but doesn’t care because Twitter and IG governed their highschool experience. Gen z doesn’t understand and are kinda boomer-esque in terms of any software comprehension. I’ve had to teach my interns what Excel even is.
Times are different. Everything has being standardized, monontonized, monitized, predictable, and generally boring. I think the fediverse would have to become mainstream to appeal to the mainstream. And today’s mainstream aren’t interested in new platform learning curves unless there’s something fun, compelling, and of entertainment value to them.
Just my old millennial lady take.
I’m gen z :[ ouch. To be fair though yeah, not that many gen z actually have digital literacy. I need to help my friends the same age as me with things boomers would also ask me for help with. It’s kind of sad having a very surface-level consumer relationship with the wonderful world of the internet and tech
Yea… and I realize how harsh it sounds but like, I put “lazy” in quotes because I don’t think it’s really laziness. Maybe more boredom? The environments’ just been designed to not invite exploration. Everything is just automatic and instant now. Innovation is driven by need. The need has been engineered away, for the most part.
Irc is probably a nice way to see how chatting was back in the 90s im a gen z and i think its quite fun to just load up a irc client then log on to random irc servers to have some fun
I’m in that demographic (born in the 90s), and my friends are definitely apathetic/uninterested in trying new platforms. I am trying to convince them of alternatives 🫡, wish me luck.
Gen z here, there are still nerds in our generation
Think part of what you’re seeing might be that previously when it was all new and niche the only people using these sites were nerds, nowadays everyone’s using it so by comparison it looks like there are less of us around
I hear Lemmy is very reminiscent of the old internet because it aggregates all the techies together like the internet in general used to
A faux front end that makes the fediverse appear centralised.
So Threads? That’s getting progress on coming to the Fediverse. Guess we would have lots more people join through that.
I’m not sure what threads is really. I’m not on Instagram. Gotta make it as simple as possible.
Threads is instagrams version of mastodon / twitter. Even know you can login with instagram it does bring it mainstream
Oh ok. Thank-you. I’m too old for Instagram! Have you tried Nostr?
More active niche communities and better search for old posts
I would love for more activity for niche communities
I didn’t even know Lemmy existed until last week (when I specifically searched for a Reddit alternative) even though I heard about Mastodon.
And it might be confusing to decide where you need to register and what’s the difference without reading up how the Fediverse works. Most people don’t care about that.
Also if they are based on the same technology why I can’t use a Mastodon account to login/interact with Lemmy (conveniently)
I guess if we ever have Nomadic identities most of the above could be solved? Except that Lemmy is still almost completely unknown for most of the people.
They won’t. There are people are still on facebook. Best we can do is have a healthy alternative that people want to come to.
not even “still on facebook”, since 2020, the surge of people moving TO facebook instead of away of facebook has increased tremendously.
the traditional second hand market sites are dying because facebook marketplace is taking over.
traditional websites and helpdesk/support channels are dying because companies are switching to facebook pages and messenger/whatsapp.
old school forums have more or less been entirely replaced by facebook groups.
alternative chat platforms have more or less died because of messenger.
branding is nearly gone everywhere and has been replaced by instagram.
the list goes on.
and imo the worst part is, facebooks policy and technical offering is inferior to the alternatives people are moving away from. and the only reason everyone is moving to facebook is because everyone is moving to facebook.
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the day Mastodon offers Groups, I will be advertising the move to Mastodon and shortly shut down the groups I run. Though, Groups was supposed to be out already last year and yet we’re in 2024 and nothing is happening. If they had managed to stick to schedule it would have been a golden opportunity because a lot of people were looking for alternatives (but found none), when facebook went ham on their policy. but as there was no alternatives, everyone’s back on facebook just circumventing the policies (for now).
Hopefully people will as I hate switching between different platforms and it’s one of the reasons I enjoy the fediverse
Same imo. There’s going to be a universal login feature coming down the pipe which should make mass adoption a lot smoother.
Yes, ActivityPub 2.0 is working on that from what I can see. It would be really cool to see how that turns out. Bluesky’s not using the same protocols though, so unsure how they are going to fix with all of that.
Eh, fuckem’ 😂
That might take a while with all 2 million of them lol
The Fediverse if a complicated concept, that looses a lot of the appeal that Twitter/Reddit has, we need more coordination between instances, and less of a scattershot approach to communities. This obviously goes against the goals of the Fediverse where you want several similar communities on different instances to make the system far more robust.
Then we need a killer community, a community that people has to have, that only really work on Lemmy, and not on Reddit.
Mastodon mostly just needs more users, especially celeberties, then users would come.
I read something about ActivityPub 2.0 being pushed for more feedback from the developers of Instances talking, so hopefully that brings more talk and direction between instances.
Lemmy would be amazing if it had some unique communities that people have been looking for, for years on Reddit. It could be a way to get Lemmy to grow.
I know there is crossover between places like Mastodon and Lemmy as at the moment I’m using Mastodon to talk to everyone on Lemmy but certainly could be improved.
Lemmy overall feels like old reddit when it was still run and filled by people who cared. Names are familiar, everyone rather(in some places) chill, and the server is on fire half the time. I forgotten what it was like to start to know people online. Reddit is too big to ever learn a name again unless its a “human” on the front page again. It’s kinda nostalgic.
Yeah it would just be nice to have some more niche communities being run. Maybe I should help start those niche communities or something but I’m not really using Lemmy anymore but still love browsing the content
I seen a lot of attempts. I don’t think we have the size to keep many smaller subs active.
For me it was a combination of seeing that there was a lot of activity on the fediverse (no point joining a social media if there’s no people on it) and also feeling the need to actually frequently use social media again, because I hadn’t been using social media for a while outside of retweeting something once in a blue moon.
We’re social creatures, so I’m sure the more people move to Fediverse, well, the more people will follow.
It is entirely up to you; every set of eyes that reads this.
Every post, every community you participate within, every upvote, every positive interaction is helping this place grow. All we need to do is make a place people want to visit; add value to their and our own lives.
Yesterday I started Word of the Day [email protected]
I moderate [email protected] and a couple of others that are not active. I’m at 179 posts and 1485+1 comments. I’m here a few times at least on most days.
I try and post in as many other communities as I can and be as positive an influence as I can manage.
The best thing you can do is upvote and participate in absolutely every little niche you can possibly participate in. I’m a jack of all trades master of none, but I’ll even go outside of my comfort zone to try and support everything I can. I don’t just take from this place, I want to build it, to grow with it, to be a part of it. I am the fediverse. You are the fediverse. It is what you make of it.
I posted this when there were less than 5k active users on Lemmy and .world was a couple of weeks old: https://lemmy.world/post/36032
That post is still just as true today.
Thank you
Yes I’ll stay active in as many places as I can on here especially when I know a topic. Even better now I’ve worked out a way to interact with people on Lemmy through Mastodon
More diverse content and a better attitude to bringing on new people who would contribute to the community. I like it here but I do see a lot of slagging off the people still on Reddit, users of other social media sites, and even other instances. I am one of those people, I still use Instagram (I like to watch cat videos and people making weird music) and occasionally Twitter (for breaking news and storm chaser stuff), and sometimes it’s a little disparaging to read lots of comments saying people like me don’t belong here.
Where are the comments saying people like you don’t belong here? I’ve never seen those
People who have been paying attention have already moved. Anyone who’s left will need a missile dropped directly on top of their head by Elon Musk or Steve Huffman personally. They will leave when the websites can no longer support themselves and shut down their servers, forcing the users out.
Yeah, tbh with all of what has happened on both of platforms, it’s sad to still see them alive.
Hopefully, people slowly start moving across or they’re some huge outage that happens in the future as it doesn’t seem like many more people are willing to move across (at least from my experience).
Who knows, Threads may help the future of the Fediverse with the amount of users that could see the possibility of it across Mastodon, Lemmy and many other instances.
Why would you want them to? Look up the “September that never ended” and what that effect does to communities.
I would like to see the Fediverse grow overtime, also we haven’t had to deal with a Decentralised network across the internet before, who knows what may happen.
There is a big difference between slow growth over time though (say a few percent of the existing user base every month) and a giant influx of new users (say 10 times the existing user base in a single month). The latter destroys everything the community was about since nobody knows the unwritten rules and new users copy bad behaviour from other new users.
Wouldn’t it help to make the rules written, then enforce them?
Reading rules is different from living them (getting used to them)
(say 10 times the existing user base in a single month)
New-born floods
we haven’t had to deal with a Decentralised network across the internet before
You say that while using the WWW, a decentralized network of Webservers and Webbrowsers all Access the world.
And you say that while using Domain names, which certainly don’t come from your /etc/Hosts but from a decentralized DNS Network of servers all around the world.
That’s different from a Protocol that anyone can use, boot up a server that has access to the whole Fediverse active posts & user base.
The Fediverse is making it so much easier for people to have users across their own social network platforms, bending the protocols to work with what vision they have, well still allowing others to access it.
Have you seen Reddit and Twitter lately? You want those people here?
I occasionally go back to reddit for niche communities and for looking up some user generated information/answers. I think the niche community might not easily be solved until more people move to lemmy, but as for the information lookup, if we can port the more useful stuff from reddit I don’t think I’d have much of a reason to go back to reddit (seriously, so much of the newer info in some subs are factually wrong but no one seems to care and it just seems to get worse the longer time progresses). The main issue is how to figure out what is the useful stuff. Idk about Twitter, haven’t used them in years.